Measuring the Union Army

Two different wartime projects are often blurred together. The first was practical: the Quartermaster's Department issued uniforms in four numbered sizes, graded roughly from a 36- to a 42-inch breast, so that contractors could cut garments in bulk. The second was scientific: beginning in 1863, the U.S. Sanitary Commission sent trained examiners with calipers, tape, and spirometers to measure 23,785 men—white and Black Union soldiers, sailors, Confederate prisoners, and others—and its actuary, the astronomer Benjamin Apthorp Gould, also tabulated the ages and heights recorded for more than a million volunteers. Gould's 1869 report became a landmark of American anthropometry; it also ranked bodies by race in ways later used to support claims of innate racial difference. Popular accounts claim this survey invented small, medium, and large; no evidence supports that. What the war did do, historians of government contracting conclude, was spread the habit of standard men's sizes into the postwar ready-to-wear trade. Standard women's sizes came much later.